Various known technologies are used to establish a connection from one network to another for the purpose, for example, of commanding a remote network entity from a local network; for example, VPN (Virtual Private Network) secure tunnels. Another solution that is widely used consists in making use of an IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture.
These existing VPN tunnel or IMS architecture-based solutions are relatively costly and complex to apply. Moreover, with VPN tunnel-based solutions, address-conflict problems arise. IMS architectures are not necessarily made freely available to users of the mass market.
In the mass-market field, the UPnP/DLNA standard takes precedence as a standard for the sharing, broadcasting and controlling of digital contents. Today, various items of equipment complying the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) standard are spread throughout homes and in particular in the multimedia field with media servers (called for example TwonkyMedia, Windows Media Player 11, etc.), media renderers (STB, DMA audio, IP-Radio, etc.) and media players (games consoles, digital photo frames, etc.).
However, the items of equipment of one UPnP network are not designed to communicate with an item of equipment of another UPnP network. Specifically, there is no solution in the UPnP standard for remotely controlling this entity. Specifically, the mechanism for discovering UPnP entities uses a command transmitter in “multicast” mode which makes it possible to discover only entities that are present in a local network and not those present in a remote network.
There is therefore a need for a simple solution for controlling, from a local network, the entities of a remote network, a solution that would be suitable for remotely controlling an entity in the form of UPnP device.